I haven't seen any strong evidence that that was the real reason he was ousted. It seems more to me like something that was too good not to go viral, rather than actual fact.

who owns the washington post?

He owned x.com before he went to PayPal (they acquired his company which was called: x.com). When ousted, the domain continued to be owned by PayPal until later they ended up selling it and eventually he bought it back.

Correct! I had an @x.com email address when I worked at PayPal a long time ago.

Fun fact: I worked with one of the people who owned x.com prior to Elon (and sold it to him, reputedly for more $$ than he wanted to pay).

No he got removed for trying to switch their servers from linux to windows.

He also got removed for creating systemic, existential risk for the company by handing out $10k line limit credit cards to anyone who wanted one, resulting in a 50% chargeback rate. There are so many reasons for them to have gotten rid of him that the answer is highly underdetermined.

Interesting this got AliBaba into trouble with the CCP. As 2008 proved handing out credit can lead to disaster.

There was quite an extended period where all the developer docs for PayPal were on x.com/something ... I found it all quite confusing.

That’s not true. It was mostly over their servers. Elon Musk’s startup was running Windows while Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s was running Linux. Musk wanted to migrate everything to Windows due to the more mature (at the time) APIs and Levchin was adamant on staying with Linux. He was also busy trying to fight fraud, which was becoming an existential threat to the company, and had no time for migrating to a different platform.

Ultimately, Levchin gathered several other key people in the company, and went to the investors threatening to quit (and destroy the company) unless they brought back Thiel as CEO. The board sided with Levchin, Theil returned and Musk was out of day-to-day operations.

If you’re interested in the PayPal story, I highly recommend Jimmy Soni’s book, The Founders. https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Paypal-Entrepreneurs-Shaped-...

“More mature (at the time) APIs”

I mean, while nothing about the web was particularly mature at the time, the idea that Windows was more mature than Linux for it is… peculiar, from the point of view of someone who was messing around with web programming at the time. Note how much difficulty Microsoft had migrating Hotmail to Windows.

Were you working in anything banking-related? AFIK, Microsoft was dominant in that sector.